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Film: 'Boyfriends' By Joan Tewkesbury

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"OLD BOYFRIENDS," the first film to be directed by Joan Tewkesbury, who has written screenplays for Robert Altman, is a movie in which the characters are more intelligent and interesting than anything they are required to do. They appear to have an existence outside the story, though I'm not sure how this can happen if, as I assume, the actors are playing the characters written in the screenplay by Paul Schrader and his brother, Leonard.Yet here is a movie in which one remembers as vividly as anything else Buck Henry in a throw-away role, that of a private investigator who is so delighted with his beautiful, statuesque secretary that he beams with helpless pleasure every time she pours a cup of coffee. His fascination with the young woman has nothing at all to do with the rest of the movie, but it is mysterious and surprising, the way life is and "Old Boyfriends" isn't. The film opens today at the Sutton.The movie presents us with the spectacle of Diane Cruise (Talia Shire), a clinical psychologist from Los Angeles, who has fallen into a deep neurotic depression following the loss of her husband. However, the way that Diane behaves doesn't suggest a depressed character as much as it does someone in the throes of a literary conceit. In an attempt to get a fix on herself, Diane sets out to track down three former boyfriends who, at different stages in her life, were crucially important to her. There's Jeff (Richard Jordan), her college love, who is now a film maker separated from his wife and, as he puts it, "a working mother" to his 13-year-old daughter. There are also Eric Katz (John Belushi), the leader of a tacky band, the fellow who humiliated her in high school, and Lewis Van Til, her grammar school boyfriend who was killed in Vietnam, but who left a younger brother, Wayne (Keith Carradine), who looks exactly the way Diane thinks Lewis would have looked if he had lived.Almost as soon as she meets Wayne, Diane starts "transferring" (based on the psychiatric meaning of the word "transference"), which — from the way it's demonstrated in this movie — is a communicable disease.Does Diane straighten herself out? Do movies have endings?There are some nice small moments in the movie, including a funny sequence about the filming of an election campaign commercial, and most of the scenes between Diane and Jeff. There's an unexpectedly affecting encounter between Diane and Wayne's mother (Bethel Leslie), which is then neutralized by a second encounter between them that is terrible.The writing veers back and forth between the good and the appalling. Says Diane, as she attempts to describe her relationship with Jeff: "He reaches inside me and pulls me out. I only wish that I could love me as much as he does." Some of this comes from her schoolgirl diaries, yet she has the unfortunate habit of talking like this in every adult crisis.Miss Tewkesbury's directorial style is loose without being lively. The screenplay doesn't help, but then it looks as if the director began production fondly hoping to discover the center of the film during the shooting. There's a good deal of seemingly unnecessary cross-cutting (between simultaneous actions), which doesn't heighten interest as often as it dissipates it. The performers, including John Houseman, who plays the small role of a psychiatrist, invest much more of themselves in the film than it ever returns to them.